Monday, December 17, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I went to a kickoff meeting of COST action IC1215 on computational social choice, and picked up a copy of the most colourful publication on display, “Ziggie and Zack: Your Lightning Heroes” (PDF), a final publication of an earlier COST action on the Physics of Lightning Flash and its Effects. I am now hopeful that the new COST action will produce a similar output featuring the hazards of voting paradoxes and computationally intractable solution concepts.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

WINE 2012 (held here in Liverpool, UK) came to a successful conclusion yesterday; I should again thank the local organisers. On Tuesday we had a short business meeting to discuss renaming WINE from “workshop” to “conference”, which is a topic I was asked to raise by colleagues a few weeks ago. Since WINE is a conference in all but name, there was a clear consensus to do this, but retaining the acronym. The favoured name that retains the acronym is “Web Interaction and Network Economics”.

We also discussed closer links with ACM, with David Parkes (chair of ACM SIGecom) suggesting some options. Currently WINE just has “in association” status with SIGecom. Being an ACM conference would represent some kind of badge of approval, and would provide some organisational support, such as links to ACM digital library and accounting/insurance/negotiation with venues. Being an ACM conference would cost money, but they would take the loss if an occurrence of WINE lost money, so it is a kind of insurance. ACM could alternatively share this status with another non-profit partner, e.g. maybe EATCS.

WINE 2013 will be at Harvard, and for WINE 2014 we had a very nice presentation by Tie-Yan Liu (at MSR Asia), for hosting WINE 2014 at either Beijing or Hong Kong (which one may depend on whether funding is forthcoming for a co-located winter school in Hong Kong). Finally, Martin Hoefer gave a presentation advertising SAGT 2013 to be held in Aachen, Germany (in the SuperC Building) (in October 2013).